A. In General
The ability of airport pavement engineers to plan required maintenance on asphalt runways and taxiways is an increasing problem for which new, lower cost, solutions are needed. Because of the high cost of closing a runway of a commercial airport, the scheduling of maintenance is very important. This problem is accentuated by the increasing frequency of air travel and the weight of aircraft. Consequently, any system that will allow maintenance to be predicted and performed a complete failure takes place (requiring an unscheduled closing) would be most welcome.
At present, there exist several methods of testing asphalt pavements and of predicting when they will require maintenance. Generally speaking, these solutions all suffer from one or more of the following problems:
(1) very time consuming,
(2) can only test a few points on the pavement,
(3) requiring the destruction of a piece of the pavement in order to get the necessary parameters for prediction.
Obviously, the longer it takes to perform the test, the more expensive it will be.